The cold hard numbers show the RIAA's legal campaign to be about as successful financially as burning money in a pit. (Source: Views Skewed)

"That does not make sense!"

In
the infamous Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) 2008
IRS tax filing, the organization revealed the stunning
financial futility of its battle against piracy.
The document[PDF],
obtained by P2PNet,
reads like a lawyer's dream and like a financial officer's worst
nightmare.

At the end of the day, RIAA paid Holmes Roberts &
Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and
Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million to pursue claims against
music pirates. That's a total of over $17.6M USD. And
there were more law firms listed -- those were just the top three
fees.

In return, it received a mere $391,000 USD in
compensation from its pirate victims. In other words -- the
RIAA spent over 45 times on lawsuits and threats than what it
received in return.

The document proves similar to those
obtained from past years. For example in 2006 the RIAA in
excess of $19M+ USD in legal fees and $3.6M USD investigative fees to
pull in $455,000 (Source [PDF]).
And in 2007, it recovered $515,929 after spending $21M+ USD on legal
fees and another $3.5M USD on its investigation (Source [PDF]).

In
total, from 2006 to 2008 the RIAA spent $64M USD to make $1.361M
USD.

Unless you're an
electric car company, those kind of financials would typically
spell the end of your company or organization. However, the
music industry seems more than happy to keep pouring money into the
hole, as they feel they're overall preventing an even greater loss of
revenue at the hands of pirates.

Unfortunately for them this
may not be true at all. Time and time again studies have shown
that pirates will continue to pirate music and movies despite the
RIAA's best efforts. Piracy shows no
sign of slowing down, despite all the lawsuits. And
likewise BitTorrent traffic continues
to grow.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Unless I have a problem with Amazon. Sued for tax evasion....No thanks.

RIAA and MPAA instead of pushing back against technology should have welcomed it and at a fair price. Instead of allowing/making companies lock down their music to one service one type of player, they should have left it open. Consequently I feel like I have to do all this research just to make sure what I am buying will work with all my current and future devices/software. aka I DONT TRUST THEM.